After working on a grounds crew i only rake bunkers when i dig me feet in deep. I dont think they should ever be raked. i had one bad lie in a bunker,  my entire life playing golf. (which made me blow a one shot lead over my brother on the 18th hole) And dont get me started on divots. If u replace a divot with anything other then sand u are wasting ur time and causing more of a hassle for the workers that need to fix them. wow this brings back bad memories.

Rich,
Have you ever played a real gutty? Do you know what it would give the game if the modern ball was reperformanced to the equivalent of the gutty?

Ralph

I've never played a gutty, but would love to try some day!  I think I do know what it would be like reading the old dead guys write, particularly and most recently by trolling the USGA archives. I am astonished to hear consistently that in the 1895-1900 period (just before the Haskell's arrival) that the average drive for a skilled player was 160-170 yards and a 400 yard hole was considered a brute of a par 5.  Somehow I don't think we today would accept having to hit two wooden clubs to 320 yard holes, alas.......

Jim N

Do those PGA stats about sand saves vs. scrambling, include putts from the fring and simple flat chips from greenside rough?  I suspect that they do, which skews things in favour of your argument.  I'm anecdotally convinced that comparing "like for like" shots from depressed areas around the green would show that bunkers are much easier to get up and down from than rough or hardpan for the skilled player, but I could be wrong.....

Tom Doak said:

"I was just out at Pacific Dunes last week and I'm amazed at how gnarly some of the bunkers are getting.  Some of them are 2-3 feet deeper than the original depth with overhanging lips and patches of hardpan in the bottom.  They do provide rakes, but some are so steep and deep that a rake isn't going to help much.

And yet they seem to be accepted by visitors!  People still enjoy the golf course and I haven't heard anyone complain directly about the difficulties they present.  I think we get away with it because it looks natural and people understand that the weather is having its way with them.  I don't think you could get away with it next to stripe-mowed rye fairways, though."

TomD:

That is most interesting. I wish you'd continue to monitor that very carefully, and report how it continues to go. This might be a very useful example to point to on this subject of an alternative to too much maintenance of bunker "lies".

Too many members watch the weekly PGA event and see the ease at which tour players exit bunkers. The tour wants to showcase talent and requires PGA event clubs to maintain their sand a certain "preferred" depths and consistency, this takes the quesswork out of a bunker shot. It makes a "tour bunker" exitable with alot less skill than trying to play out of Mrs. Havencamp's rake job in the weekly Nassau. This PGA show does little to bring the reality of real bunkers into the viewers mind, thus the cycle of reality and the PGA Tour begins. Remember the scenes of NicKlaus taking 6-7 to exit Hell Bunker in the '00 British Open or Duval in the Road Hole bunker the same year? That is how golf was meant to be played.    

Cog Hill before the Western Open had very soft sand that usually resulted in a fried egg lie  that you couldn't do anything with except blast and hope.  When the Western came there the PGA mandated firmer sand conditions which eliminated the fried eggs and made the bunkers much easier.

Why is it that sand bunkers in the UK are so much more difficult, what caused the divergence in style and difficulty?  It seems like Golden era bunkers were more penal than today's.  Was it purely the tour effect or did something change in terms of architectural style  and manufacturing and maintenance techniques?

I had a person who is one of the people who has been in charge with setting up events like the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup tell me that bunkers should be raked each day so that the grooves point towards that days hole location.  Talk about making things simple for the players.

I agree with the suggestion that if you want to make bunker recovery less automatic, make the sand much softer so that a high spinning approach is more likely to bury.  This wouldn't hurt poor players so much (as they are more likely to bounce into a trap or have a lower trajectory so it won't bury)  It might even encourage players to use a lower running approach in certain cases to avoid the fried egg lie.


Jim Nugent,

I believe Rich's point is that all those simple putts from the fringe and easy chips that are nearly 100% saves for pros skew the results heavily.  Watch a tour event for a couple hours and count how many times a player has a putt (or something he could putt if he wanted) as a percentage of the overall potential saves.  I'll bet it is 15-20%, so if you eliminated those from the tally you'd probably find sand saves are at worst the same as other greenside shots, if not a few percentage points better.  Remember, when someone is yelling "get in the bunker" they aren't yelling that if it might catch fringe.  They are yelling it when it definitely won't catch fringe but is otherwise going to catch rough.

In addition, pros who hit into bunkers are usually short sided, making them much harder to get up and down from.  For amateurs the distribution is probably a lot more random, since pins aren't as tight by certain bunkers in typical course setups and amateurs are less accurate so hooking a ball into the left bunker when shooting at a pin tucked front right is far more likely than it is for a pro.  If a pro's golf ball was simply dropped into a random bunker around the green I'll bet they'd get at least 70% saves.

To illustrate this, I can point out a little personal anecdote.  I tracked my sand saves among other stats for a season about 5 or 6 years ago and it was just over 50%, and I believe I've been fairly consistent in that regard over the years.  Does that mean I'm as good as the pros in sand saves?  Heck no!  While I'm better than most, I'm sure there's no chance I'm as good as even the worst pro in that regard, if I had to play from where they do on the courses they do I'd probably be fortunate to manage a save one time in three.

One final consideration is that being in a bunker tends to minimize your chance for a double bogey.  I might not save par every time, but I don't get many doubles from there.  From rough, if you draw a bad lie you can either fluff or chunk it short and be faced with an up and down for bogey or catch a mini-flyer with lots of roll and put yourself over the other side or into potential three putt territory.  Even if I had the exact same percentage of saves from the bunker as from greenside rough I'd still want to be in the bunker for that reason alone.  The lies you find a maintained bunker are far more consistent than what you draw in rough, especially a course with some pretty gnarly greenside rough like mine.

Jim,

I don't think anyone is doubting that bunkers exact a toll when compared to a GIR!  The question is whether they exact a toll compared to greenside rough.  If they don't, why do we have them on courses where sand isn't natural to the land?  And I don't think they do extract much if any toll compared to deeper greenside rough, at least for a lot of better players.  For a 100 shooting amateur they do, but greenside rough is no picnic for those guys either so again, what's the point of a bunker?

Which is why I like the idea of filling them with soft sand so a high shot will bury, it will make bunkers tougher for the better players hitting those high shots, and have less of an effect on the 100 shooter who is bouncing shots into the bunker or hitting lower trajectory shots into it that are less likely to bury.  If you stop raking them they'll be tougher for everyone, and the gap of bunker success between scratch and 100 shooter would IMHO become even larger (because the scratch guy can at least get it out of the bunker from a footprint, while the 100 shooter might hit shot after shot that doesn't get out and goes from footprint to footprint!)